InMotion Hosting attends Joomla Day Boston 2014

Last weekend, I boarded a plane headed for Boston. My goal? Have an excellent time at Joomla Day Boston. Let me say right here in the introduction, it was a success! I had a really great time attending / speaking at Joomla Day Boston.

Speaker Dinner

If you didn't know, most of these events usually have a dinner party the evening before the event begins. The sponsors and the speakers attend these dinners, and there's usually lots to drink and eat. Because I was speaking this year, I had the pleasure of attending this dinner at Cambridge Brewing Company! Throughout the night, I got the chance to speak to quite a few people: @robbieadair, @RobertJacobi, @Matt_Simonsen, @JessicaDunbar, and @mbabker.

Day 1 - Saturday, March 15 2014

How to get rich with Joomla

The event kicked off with a keynote by David Hurly, Get Rich Quick with Joomla! CMS. We didn't learn how to make our first million with Joomla, monetary gain wasn't the focus of this keynote. David's goal was to teach everyone how he has become rich from Joomla - rich in friendship / community / knowledge / experience. Getting rich with money wasn't ignored completely, and the take away point is that for many people, become rich in everything else ultimately leads to monetary gain in one way or another!

Hello Ajax World

The InMotion Hosting Support Center uses AJAX in several places. It is custom code that we've written, and so far it's run without any major problems. During Matt Thomas' presentation, Hello Ajax World, we came to find out that Joomla is now shipping with an Ajax component built in.

The discussions during this presentation looked at the AJAX component from several different angles. Matt's focus was showing us a Hello World example of using ajax within Joomla. The message was that it was very easy to make ajax calls with the new component, and indeed and looks as if it is (I've yet to try it). However, as this component uses the Joomla framework, there were questions concerning the scalability and resource usage that these types of ajax calls can make on the server. There was also concerns that the content displayed through the ajax calls would not be seen by Google, and could ultimately lead to SEO related issues.

Joomla Marketing - Interactive Session

Jessica Dunbar is apart of the Joomla Marketing Team. During her talk, she let us know that the Marketing team has roughly 50 - 100 projects that they're working on, and they need help! Would you like to contribute? Check out slide 24.

Joomla Extensions (and How to Work with Developers)

Matt Simonsen spoke on Saturday as well, his presentation being about working effectively with developers. My favorite piece of information he provided? Don't treat programmers like greasy car mechanics! Many people will get upset when their developers quote them for more hours than they believe a project should take. Keep in mind that even though the concept may seem simply, sometimes the programmatic solution is more complicated and time intensive than you think.

Tips for Running a Large Website Using Joomla

The last planned set of talks on Saturday included my presentation, Tips for Running a Large Website Using Joomla. The turnout wasn't that big, but that setup a relaxed atmosphere great for asking questions. A big thanks to Paul Parisi, who kept me on my feet with his excellent questions.

Day 2 - Sunday, March 16 2014

Day 2 was more of a developer day. David Hurley and Michael Babker focused on teaching the Joomla Framework, while Matt Thomas and Ken Crowder helped a few of us get started with helping squash bugs!